I liked your other comment on this better, fwiw.

I'm trying pretty hard not to get defensive here, so before I respond, I need to point out that I originally posted a comment intended to help people get a better Apache config; I didn't claim anywhere that it was the perfect one, or that there weren't better ways to go about it. I posted the comment to a thread started by a post clearly aimed at total newbies (and SEO), which is why my comment stuck mostly to really really simple stuff, and didn't include other notes, like changing the server's file descriptor limit. Now I'm letting myself get dragged in to a debate over, frankly, minutiae that doesn't belong under a post about "setting up your first web server". I work all the time on a mind-blowingly wide array of technologies, yet I never talk about it because

I

hate

this

shit.

So much.

So, that said: if my customer wants to shave 1.5 seconds off of their page load times, the very first thing they need to do is (drumroll...) _not_have_156_resources_on_their_landing_page_. We're not talking about 1.5 seconds for the average Wordpress site here (54 requests, based on a Wordpress blog picked at semi-random). So let's just be clear that we're talking about a 10ms delay per request over a connection with a 96ms ping.

If they did that, and still weren't happy with the results, then the next thing I would do is pay for a bigger VPS instance.

If I did that, and they still weren't happy with the results, then the next thing I would do is move their site to a server in a data center closer to their geographic location.

If I did that, and they still weren't happy, then the next thing I would do is charge them a brand new premium rate of about 10x what they're paying now, and I would re-configure my PowerDNS servers to do geoip-based results and I would set up nginx proxies (all of which I intend to do eventually anyway).

If I did that, and they still weren't happy, I still wouldn't bother farting around with KeepAlive, because at this point I've entirely removed Apache from the page load equation because doing all of this is easier than screwing around with the Apache config any more than I already have.

Please don't get me wrong. I think performance is really really important. It's a frequent soapbox point for me. I have already sunk a ton of time into making my server setups secure and fast and reliable. I will continue to sink more completely irretrievable time into that. However, as geeks it's easy for us to lose sight of what's actually important: should I spend more time trying to remove a 10ms delay per request without sacrificing reliability, or should I answer some more support requests and get another job done on time?

I also have to confess that part of my problem is that I don't trust any of the web server stress testing tools that I've used so far. Like, at all. It's possible that I'm too dumb to use them, but I can't find one (even a paid service) that I can use and say to myself, "Yeah, so that's what would happen if the website got on the front page of Reddit." Without some kind of really solid tools to use for testing, I'm disinclined to try to squeeze 10ms of extra performance out of the server and take it right up to the hairy edge of what a VPS can do. If you have a recommendation for a stress tester that you feel does a good job of emulating front-page-on-Reddit syndrome, by all means, please share. I'd love to try it, turn some more knobs, and maybe even write a post titled "the best Apache-on-Linode config for surviving the front page of Reddit".